In light of the transgenderism issue and the Google controversy, I really have to ask: what is gender, actually? If there are real behavioral differences between men and women that are innate, as opposed to just societal, then shouldn’t we be able to discuss them openly, without fear of being considered sexist? Or are there no innate behavioral differences, which would render transgenderism meaningless?
What is a man? What is a woman? Biologically that’s easy to answer. It’s also fairly easy to answer in terms of societal expectations, although those are always changing. But how would I know if my gender is the same as my sex assigned at birth? What kinds of things would be going on in my head that might tip me off that I’m actually a woman?
Doing some of my own research, I found this test which is apparently considered the gold standard:
So if I lean more towards supposed female attributes, am I actually female? And aren’t these attributes more accurately described as stereotypes?
Genetically, gender is determined, socially, you can be whoever you want. I suppose it has to do with hormonal balances in each individual person. Some hormones elicit behavior that we as societies attribute to being a specific gender, testosterone (obnoxious male), estrogen (emotional female). You are born a certain way, but you don’t have to stay that way. It essentially comes down to what society depicts are stereotypical of a certain gender.
There are innate differences between the two groups XX and XY. For instance the first group almost entirely develop female genitals and the other almost entirely, but to a slightly lesser degree (IIRC) develop male genitals. Similarly there’s a clear split (but already a slightly larger overlap) in hormone production.
There are other differences that appear to be more statistically common in one of these groups than the other, but when we move beyond genitals and hormones the statistical overlap between the XY and XX group on each trait becomes much larger, and it is obvious today that the historical and cultural assignment of masculine and feminine to the end points of these traits, has a significant influence on their development in individuals, so the predominance of XY-s at one end and XX-s at the other doesn’t indicate a useful assignment of them as XY and XX traits to the degree one operated with in the past.
This being a polarized and culturally significant topic you will of course see people blind to the details of their opponents actual meaning and view point, but in my experience the vast majority of people who proclaim a desire to “discuss [differences between men and women] openly, without fear of being considered sexist” only want to establish these differences, and ignore the fact that beyond developing one type of genitals or the other, the differences, even when shown to exist in good research, are statistical differences between populations, most often with a very large overlap between XYs and XXs, and even that statistical difference is very unlikely to be entirely genetic.
Well, yes, gender is in a way a stereotype. It’s the stereotype that a society has of how people wearing a certain label behave. Whether we limit the root of the “gender” itself to genotypical sex, phenotypical sex, sexual behavior, gender-based presentation (which yes, is a circular concept), or other labels, depends on which sociologist you ask.
US society has really grabbed onto that sociological concept; other societies prefer to talk about each of the label groups separately. But then, US society tends to really really really like classifications and labels.
That’s genotypical sex, which is a different thing. One is chemical, one is sociological.
Okay, so gender identity is based on a person’s ideas of social gender roles? I wonder if a person more likely to not believe in gender roles would also be less likely to experience gender confusion?
You can’t judge an individual by their biological sex, but if you want to figure out why there are more men than women in STEM, which is the issue in the Google controversy, I don’t see any way around it than to discuss such differences. Otherwise you have a scientific question which is forever unanswerable because it’s not okay to ever look into the question in the first place.
Recognizing and discussing differences is one thing, drawing conclusions of value judgement supported by perceived differences is another thing entirely. IMHO that is what is at issue whenever someone wants to “discuss differences” (race, gender, religion, etc.)
Absolutely. Personally, and this is just my opinion, I don’t think there are any innate behavioral differences that are significant enough to generalize about, I think it’s 99% environment and societal expectations. But those do not equal discrimination and they are not necessarily something the corporate world can or should try to fix. If women were graduating with STEM degrees at the same rate as males and yet males dominated the STEM professions, that would be discrimination. But that’s not what’s happening. If we decide as a society that there should be more equality in this field, the place that has to happen is on the ground level. Girls need to be able to be interested in computers and have friends who are interested in computers. But thats’ not easy, which discourages girls from being interested in computers. Even for boys it’s not always a picnic, as you end up in a group fairly low in the school pecking order, but for whatever reason boys are more willing to accept that reality, whereas for girls being thought less of by her peers because of her intellectual interests is devastating. Race, culture, and religion also influence this social sorting. But activists don’t like to focus much on this because there’s no easy villain to blame. It’s not like you can suspend a kid for telling another kid, “Uh! You and your computer obsession, get a life!”
But is the bird tweeting or chirping, and what if the bird sometimes tweets but sometimes chirps? And what about birds that neither tweet nor chirp? Clearly, we need to have separate birdbaths for these different birds, no?
We see behavior differences between males and females throughout the animal kingdom, including in our closest genetic relatives. It would be strange, indeed, if there were no behavioral differences between men and women. And if we assign more genders than just two, then one might expect there to be behavioral differences involved in being one of those genders as well.
Whether or not there is a different level of intelligence is a different story altogether. Or rather, whether men and women might be have differing abilities across the intelligence spectrum (recognizing that “intelligence” isn’t just one thing). And, of course, we must always realize that what we generally see are different distribution curves, not two (or more) different delta functions.
This is a bit like people looking at global warming and say “I don’t see any way around this than to discuss the influence of the sun”, guess what, this is not new ground, and also like someone looking at data showing small differences on the population level and using this as the foundation of their musings while ignoring the large individual variation and the rock solid evidence of tons of cultural influence.
Nonsense. This is a question that has been looked into, and is still being looked into. Progress is however not going to be made by people who profess to not be biased, but totally ignore the existence of evidence against what, with the current level of evidence for cultural bias, can only be called a sexist hypothesis.
I think it’s reasonable to say that gender originated as a set of generalizations about differences between the two sexes. (And identifying exactly two sexes is, itself, a generalization to begin with). As generalizations I also think it’s reasonable to say that they aren’t entirely incorrect.
There’s a propaganda component of sorts: societies tend to want to organize sexuality and reproduction because they have outcomes that societies have tended to want to channel more narrowly than they might express otherwise. So “gender” includes notions about the sexes and their natures that are inherently prescriptive rather than natively descriptive.
Anyway, gender has functioned as a generalization that became prescriptive overall: that exceptions are not merely exceptions to a general rule but are pathologized as deviant.
Gender is tied conceptually to sexual orientation. Hetersexual viability is socially defined in terms of conformity to normative (generalization-fitting) gender characteristics for each of the sexes. So the labeling as “deviant” is simultaneously a labeling of non-heterosexual sexual orientations as deviant and a labeling of atypical gender expressions as deviant, and because the two concepts are conflated into one, it’s a bit of a “chicken versus egg” question as to whether the hate is originally against non-heterosexual sexualities or against atypical gender expressions, or if it’s always been both. (Not that it matters much).
Against this social backdrop, gender is the portion of a person’s gender that pertains to who they identify with as being “the same kind of person as me”, the internalized sense of self. It’s about how they relate to the world of generalizations about sex differences, but it isn’t directly about sexual morphologiy itself. And it’s a different thing than sexual orientation, although as I pointed out they’ve been entwined socially in such a way that anyone contemplating their own gender identity usually ends up thinking a lot about sexual orientation as well.
And what does one do about cultural bias? If young females are more afraid of being considered a “loser” by their peers than young males, that’s a cultural bias. It’s also a rather tricky problem to solve.
No magic wands available, but anecdotal experience over the last half-century in particular supports the idea that when there are viable, available counterexamples, it makes it easier for people to reject the “conventional wisdom” of those cultural biases. In other words if young females (to continue using this example) are exposed to some examples of women who don’t give a shit about being regarded as “losers” in that sense, that can be empowering – “if she can be that way, then hey so can I”
Definitely, and it is a lot better than when I was a kid. But it still requires being willing to go against the grain, which by definition is not something a majority are willing to do.
I’ll know things have really changed when I can walk by an all girl group discussing time travel paradoxes.
I’m a woman who, twenty years ago, graduated from high school where I did not give one flying fuck that I wasn’t popular, and began a computer science program at a big, prestigious university.
Less than a year later I dropped out. I had a million solid reasons and none of them were social. I went on to get a doctorate in computational linguistics, which let me work in AI, like I’d wanted to, to do it in the way I’d wanted to, and without being told that “working in STEM fields is the best thing to do because it’s male dominated and we want to make women as good as men! Don’t you dare drop out because then you won’t be as good as a man!” Which is exactly what the goddamned “Women in Science” program told me.
I do believe that there is something more than social differences at work in the gender disparity within STEM fields, but I also believe it’s inane to generalize about what those differences are, and I’m fairly offended that you’d go straight to “girls can’t handle not being teh popular prom queenz cuz that’s all they care about!”
